Natalie Sansone and her family are “not usually bug people” but the family has welcomed a rare pink grasshopper into their northeast London, Ont., home after finding it hopping across their driveway.
Sansone and her husband, Ryan Seed, were walking home from school with their 3-year-old and 5-year-old on Tuesday afternoon when Seed spotted the pink grasshopper in front of the house.
“We all kind of dropped our stuff and got down to the ground to look and sure enough, there it was just hopping across the driveway,” said Sansone.
When Sansone ran inside to grab her camera for a picture, Seed began researching the creature. The family decided to put the insect in a box their kids used to view insects after Seed read online that pink grasshoppers are rare and likely to be eaten.
The hot pink grasshopper is an oddity, but experts say that’s less a result of its genes and more about its attractiveness to predators.
“These pink grasshoppers are rare, but they’re not exceedingly rare,” said Andrew Young, an assistant professor and entomologist at the University of Guelph. “It’s rare in nature because they’re so obvious to predators that they tend to get picked off really quickly.”
Young said the grasshopper’s pink hue is a dominant gene – similar to brown eyes in humans – where only one parent needs to have the gene for it to appear in a child. The pink grasshoppers would be more common if they weren’t eaten by birds, small rodents and other insects.
The family has since transferred their grasshopper, now named “Bubbles” (a nod to the creature’s resemblance to bubblegum), from the insect box into a more spacious terrarium.
“We don’t know what to do with it,” said Sansone. “My husband thinks we should keep it because he’s worried that once we let it free, it’s going to get eaten.”
Steve Marshall, a retired entomologist from the University of Guelph, said it’s a realistic prediction.
“The mortality rate is very, very high in grasshoppers to begin with. With respect to the [pink grasshopper], that’s very likely the fate for that individual,” said Marshall. “But they could release it and it might well develop into a viable adult.”
He said the age of the family’s found grasshopper also reduces its survival rate. The grasshopper, commonly known as a Carolina locust, is a nymph, meaning it is immature and has no wings.
Young said that keeping the grasshopper would not have any environmental consequences.
“I think there’s an argument to be made for leaving wild animals out in the wild, but also — especially if they have kids that are interested in it – taking one grasshopper out of the population isn’t really going to cause any harm,” he said.
“I grew up doing that kind of thing. That’s how I got interested in entomology myself,” said Young.
If other Londoners encounter a pink grasshopper, Marshall has simple advice: “Take some pictures and admire it. They’re pretty cool.”
